LAST TUESDAY morning at a number of breakfast tables across Scotland a fresh copy of the Herald was unfolded, smoothed out, and somebody promptly choked on their All Bran. And after some well-I-nevers and have-you-evers, they lifted the phone and gave us a piece of their mind.

What they were complaining about was a side-profile,

neck-to-crotch picture of a pregnant teenager which occupied much of the upper right hand corner of the front page. The picture was not obscene. It was a stunning, beautifully-composed photograph, and all the more dramatic for the fact that the girl was a 17-year-old prostitute, two months from giving birth and still on the game.

It was used to illustrate a series looking at Scotland's sex industry and the vulnerable women who can become trapped within it, exposed to horrifying levels of violence, isolated by an often confused legal system, and dismissed contemptuously by many who consider themselves a rank above.

''You'll have people who read this about us and say, 'How could she do that?' Who'll say, 'No matter how bad things were I would never, ever do that','' said one of the prostitutes we interviewed. ''Well, I thought the same. I never thought I would do this. You just don't know. You don't know what you would do until you were in our shoes.''

The picture and the stories that followed should have offended against anyone's sense of what is right and decent for late twentieth century society, but for some it just plain offended. And even in some cases what offended more was the naked pregnant belly itself rather than the mum-to-be's occupation.

Hugh Cudlipp, you might imagine, would not have held any truck with such complaints. That's not to say that the legendary tabloid editor of the 1950s and 1960s, who died this week, didn't care what his readers thought. He was passionate about the people he felt the paper represented. But he was never one for being mealy-mouthed when the opportunity arose to tell it like it is. As one obituary noted yesterday, his one rule as a newspaperman was to print what he thought ordinary people would like to hear, but other papers might be too reticent to publish. When Khrushchev walked out of the 1960 Paris Summit, for example, Cudlipp's Daily Mirror ran the headline: ''Mr K. Don't Be So Bloody Rude.''

He doubtless had received a barrage of complaints five years earlier for a headline he published in the midst of the interminable

will-she-won't-she crisis over the romance between Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend. ''Come On, Margaret,'' the front page read, ''Please Make Up Your Mind.''

These were the days before tabloid became a four-letter word and Cudlipp tempered his blunt talk with a belief that a paper's job was as much to inform and present the news simply and directly, as to reflect the likes and dislikes of its readership.

In his late retirement, then, he must have baulked at the notion of custom newspapers, the 1990s computer innovation for all those who find the world a touch unpalatable and would prefer to structure news to fit their own sensibilities. At first, these personalised news services seem like a good idea. You list your areas of interest and the computer scours the globe, picking out pertinent articles which will pop up on screen the following morning.

That's fine if you use it as an addition to your daily diet of news, but if it comes to replace it that's when the trouble starts. Then you're not interested in the world as it is, only in the world as you would like it to be.

Then it's not news. It's information that has been gutted, filleted, scoured, and served up as clean and bland as a church newsletter. Want to blot out international disasters and crises? Press return. Prefer not to know about the dry details of political development? Press delete. Want pictures of Liz Hurley's knickers instead of the aftermath of the Jakarta riots? Click here.

Critics take comfort from the fact that the idea has not taken off as spectacularly as predicted, but the technology is improving by the hour and with newspapers becoming more and more caught up in the Internet business, there can be few editors these days prepared to dismiss the notion out of hand.

But before the virtual broadsheet takes off in any real way, it might help to know about the judicious pruning and prettifying that goes on in - almost - every newspaper in the land to protect readers' often delicate sensibilities. It's not censorship as such, but just enough tweaking and tidying to smooth the rough edges a little bit. Is this picture prurient? Can I get away with b****r? How about b*****ks? Obviously not.

And if such gentle adjustments are still not enough, ask yourself this. When all you have before you on the breakfast table in the morning is a mouse and a laptop, what are you going to rustle indignantly when the sight of a teenage prostitute's pregnant belly threatens to put you off your cereal and sends you reaching for the phone?